Nokia picks Infinera to boost its optical networking arm

Nokia has announced its intention to buy optical networking specialist Infinera for $2.3 billion. 

The motivation for the Infinera acquisition is scale, said Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark, during an analyst call detailing the announcement. 

Jimmy Yu, Dell'Oro Group

Optical networking is how communications service providers and hyperscalers cope with the exponential traffic growth. 

Continual innovation is required to reduce the cost and power consumed to transport such traffic. For a systems vendor, having scale helps meet these aims.

Optical networking wasn't always central to Nokia's strategy. In 2013, Nokia sold its optical networking arm to Marlin Equity Partners, which became Coriant.

Now, Nokia wants to be a leading optical networking vendor by acquiring Infinera, a company that bought Coriant in 2018.   

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Ribbon offers for trial its 1.2T wavelength 9408 platform

Ribbon Communications has started working with operators to trial its latest Apollo 9408 optical transport platform that supports 1.2 terabits per second (Tbps) optical wavelengths.

The company's modular platform also can send 800 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) wavelengths over 1,000km and 400Gbps wavelengths over ultra-long-haul networks.

Jonathan Homa

"We have conducted trials, including one with a Tier 1 European provider," says Jonathan Homa, senior director of solutions marketing at Ribbon. "You can get 1.2 terabits within major cities, 800 gigabits covering major states or regions, and 400 gigabits for about as long as you want to go."

"The Apollo 9408 is Ribbon's first disaggregated transponder unit or compact modular box using the CIM 8 for up to 1.2Tbps of wavelength speed," says Jimmy Yu, vice president at market research firm Dell'Oro Group.

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Marvell kickstarts the 800G coherent pluggable era

Marvell has become the first company to provide an 800-gigabit coherent digital signal processor (DSP) for use in pluggable optical modules.

The 5nm CMOS Orion chip supports a symbol rate of over 130 gigabaud (GBd), more than double that of the coherent DSPs for the OIF's 400ZR standard and 400ZR+.

Meanwhile, a CFP2-DCO pluggable module using the Orion can transmit a 400-gigabit data payload over 2,000km using the quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) modulation scheme.

The Orion DSP announcement is timely, given how this year will be the first when coherent pluggables exceed embedded coherent module port shipments.

This is the year coherent pluggable modules exceed embedded coherent port shipments. Source: LightCounting

"We strongly believe that pluggable coherent modules will cover most network use cases, including carrier and cloud data centre interconnect," says Samuel Liu, senior director of coherent DSP marketing at Marvell.

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North American operators in an optical spending rethink

Optical transport spending by the North American operators dropped 13 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of 2014, according to market research firm Dell'Oro Group.

Operators are rethinking the optical vendors they buy equipment from as they consider their future networks. "Software-defined networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) - all the futuristic next network developments, operators are considering what that entails," says Jimmy Yu, vice president of optical transport research at Dell’Oro. "Those decisions have pushed out spending."

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Optical transport to grow at a 10% CAGR through 2017

• Global optical transport market to reach US $13bn in 2017
• 100 Gigabit to grow at a 75% CAGR

"I won't be surprised if it [100 Gig] grows even faster"

Jimmy Yu, Dell'Oro Group

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60-second interview with .... Dell'Oro's Jimmy Yu

Market research firm Dell'Oro Group has reported that the global optical transport equipment market in the first half of 2012 shrank 5 percent, to US $6.1 billion. In the latest 60-second interview, Gazettabyte spoke with Jimmy Yu, vice president of optical transport research at Dell’Oro Group.

"For the year, it is going to be a fivefold growth rate [for 100 Gig transport]."

Jimmy Yu, Dell'Oro

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